# Even when the first sentence of the book provides details about the suicides of the female protagonists and even when the narrator is a vague collective ‘we‘ of neighbourhood boys, it can fuel curiosity and end up being a page-turner. Sometimes endings makes for great beginnings. Or maybe each ending is always a beginning, considering that’s when everything makes sense. I’m reading The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides.
# There is always the option to dive and resurface with an appropriate mask that won’t make a valued friend uncomfortable to be around you. It can be a mask of essential detachment that would not crowd their imagination with unnecessary obligations, worries about unmet expectations and unintended hurt. You will feel a secret guilt that you aren’t being true to yourself, but then sometimes detachment spares unnecessary confusion and ironically maintains friendships. If you want things to be normal, take the initiative in behaving normally.
# Just for once put the words ‘hips‘ and ‘boobs‘ in the title of a post and watch the blog traffic escalate. It doesn’t matter that the content of your post isn’t remotely pornographic; a crowd of faceless strangers titillated by such anatomical catchphrases would swarm to your blog. Majority would be disappointed by the lack of sexual content and never return. You are relieved by the exclusion of such audience; but they had served their temporary purpose of upping the web traffic into numbers that you had never received with titles relating to books or love .
# I had heard of post-coital rituals that involves any combination of psychedelic music, naps, cuddles, smoking, or maybe reading; but it alarmed me that there is an unofficial genre of post-coital literature. I wonder what are the points that tips a book into that particular genre. Sleep-inducing? Post-modernism? Titillating? Spiritual? Or maybe good old love?
# It is amazing the innumerable ways things can go from point A to point B, and in real life, a straight line is the least common of them all.
# Coffee that has turned cold (and not cold coffee) can act as an unintentional laxative for some people (not me).
# Sitting in a pool of sunshine, away from distractions and people and responsibilities, with just a good book and some imagination can undo a lot of emotional ravages and allows for fresh starts. A vacation in an exotic locale isn’t a prerequisite for it; a quiet spot in the park, the terrace or even the bed by an open window does the trick.
# German language is populated with hefty compound words but they end up being the fun and unintentional motivation of learning it. Take fernweh (an ache for the faraway), backpfeifengesicht (a face in need of the fist) and my favourite herbeisehnen (the feeling of missing something you love while knowing that its likelihood of return is unknowable and entirely left to fate). I can’t wait to know more.
Dialect of Heart 